It's a compromise. It's more difficult to modify the hardware than the software. And the software can easily be compromised without even the owner knowing it by various spyware.
A computer at an internet cafe is likely to have spyware on it, but it would take more work for them to install a physical keylogger. So if you sit down at one of those, you should at least check it for one of these.
So this will protect you when you're borrowing a friend's computer or dropping in on a client or customer. Probably. It can't reduce the trust to zero. You can get closer to zero by borrowing an Ethernet cable and using your own laptop, but it would certainly be convenient to have to bring along nothing more than a tiny USB key than having to schlep around your own processor, monitor, and keyboard.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 2, Informative
The front page says "not patented". They could claim it as a trade secret, but not if they plan to introduce an RFC. So even if they don't wish to open their sources, there will be open implementations very quickly.
Assuming there aren't any underlying IP issues. I'm not aware of any patents on the forward error correcting codes they're using, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. And assuming some jackass doesn't say, "Here's a thing and it's not patented; I'll patent it and then license it back to the guys who did the work!" The patent office seems to do a lousy job of checking non-patent prior art.
From the first paragraph of TFA: This problem stems from the fact that TCP calculates the congestion of the channel based on its round-trip time. The round-trip time, however, reflects not only the congestion level, but also the physical length of the connection. This is precisely why TCP is inherently unable to reach optimal speeds on long high-bandwidth connections.
A secondary, but just as impairing, property of TCP is its inability to tolerate even small amounts (1% - 3%) of packet loss.
I find it kind of interesting that these are two competing problems: one having to do with high bandwidth (and presumably high-reliability) connections, the other with low-reliability connections. My home DSL, however, often fits into the latter category: 3% packet loss is not uncommon on bad days. So maybe the two aren't so incompatible after all.
While I lament the death of Usenet as a tool, many of its purposes have been subsumed by the Web. Slashdot itself is a key example. For various software products company web boards have replaced the Usenet group.
That's not just due to the the flamers there are also technological reasons. Usenet is a store-and-forward system; it's replicated all over the place (usually at your ISP). That was crucial when even the high-speed lines between service providers were 56kbps, but today you can go to a single site from anywhere and get decent response time. The distributed system made it slow and unreliable.
Web sites also have the advantage over Usenet in that you can use a single tool that you already have to access it. You don't need to install special software. It's true that most Windows users already have Outlook, but wouldn't know how to configure it.
I do lament the death of Usenet. There are many things it does better than the web sites do. Back in the day I could go to comp.lang.apl and confer with reliable experts on APL. And actually that's still true for some newsgroups, the obscurer the better. But at this point the death of Usenet is recursive: I don't go there because nobody else goes there. I'll sometimes use Google Groups to search it for answers to a question, but since I'm not posting to it nobody else gets to converse with me, and so they too gradually drop out.
And it's too bad that I have to learn hundreds of different web-based message systems (with the corresponding array of logins to maintain) rather than the single point of entry to Usenet.
Slashdot, and most other bulletin-board type systems, doesn't do the sort of long-term conversations that Usenet was good for. But people now go to other places for entertainment; conversation is out. It's much more passive and that's too bad. So it makes me sad that I don't even have a newsreader any more.
Those who modded it up were presumably hoping it would get noticed and answered. It's a rather insightful question; I don't really understand why "c is constant in all reference frames" either, even though I've read all this stuff enough times to understand why the various transformation formulas derive from that assumption.
I think Slashdotters aren't so much opposed to advertising as to the most impolite uses of it.
The best thing about ads on Slashdot is that they're extremely well targeted. There's a very good reason to believe you're going to want the product they're advertising. Slashdot ads are in good taste; they don't advertise penis enlargers or porn. Google ads are also well targeted.
The other concern is distraction. When Slashdot puts up an ad at worst it's a moving GIF (which I have turned off anyway); it's never the extremely distracting flashing-red-on-yellow. Such ads make the page very hard to read, and you don't want to come back.
Some people find even that bit of advertising too distracting, and I like Slashdot's way of saying, "Look, we have to pay for this somehow. Send us money and you don't have to see the ads." It seems a good compromise.
The worst infringer is spam, which is taking advantage of your openness with your email address. That openness is a good thing; you could whitelist people but that would be extremely inconvenient and you'd miss real opportunities. They are also frauds more often than not.
Newspaper ads are not impolite. They don't move. They're usually at least a little bit relevant and almost never outright fraud (even if "advertorials" can be extremely opinionated.) I think the worst I've noticed are "collectible coins" whose value is far less than stated in the ads. It's a far cry from Nigerian scams and fake herbal ecstasy.
So I'd say that slashdotters as a group (there are always individual exceptions) aren't opposed to ads themselves so much as they are opposed to impoliteness. This Firefox ad sounds like a polite way to make an announcment and reach a lot of people without actively irritating those who do not wish to know.
Depends on what you want to do with it. You can't push a trillion polygons through 'em, and you can't render video on 'em, but for office suites, email, and web browing, a $500 Dell is entirely sufficient. ($300 if you take into account the fact that you already own a monitor by now and don't need a new one.)
The entry point to Windows is lower than the entry point to Macintosh. I believe you can score an eMac for around $800.
Whether you'll enjoy it as much as an eMac, which is a few hundred dollars more, that's a matter of taste. The article is about top-of-the-line systems, but a lot of the nice things it has to say apply just as well to the bottom end of the Mac line.
I read Google News for the same reason I metamoderate slashdot. It gives me a random glimpse of some things I wouldn't read otherwise.
It's not the best view, but it's an interestingly quirky one. But I also read other sources for a more consistent view, the same way I read the Slashdot homepage.
I'm just worried that the way they will regulate it will make it impossible. I can easily see them mandating equipment to prevent boosters from falling on people's houses even though they're shooting from the Mojave desert and there's no chance of it happening.
Or mandating a bunch of extra safety equipment on board that makes the thing too heavy to fly. This is a risky endeavor, and it's going to operate on the edge of safety. Those who go up crave that risk and that adventure. They want to know that reasonable precautions for their safety have been taken, but there is a line where too much safety makes the whole venture impossible; weight is everything on this.
I agree that it is the place of government to protect us from each other, and I hope that well-written legislation can make it happen. Sadly, I've seen very little well-written legislation.
If they say, "You must clear out a space X miles wide for every Y miles you want to go up", I think that sounds reasonable. But if they want you to put airbags on the thing, especially if that comes about because the Senator from the Airbag Producing State decides his constituents want to sell more airbags, they could kill the entire venture all at once.
[I can't believe I'm suddenly sounding like a Republican. I'm usually all for government regulation; it's our communal way to keep us safe from each other, and I never trust the oil or chemical industries to regulate themselves. But in this case it's a bunch of smart people who don't want to kill anybody or look bad, so I do trust them to regulate themselves better than Congress can.]
You've hit the nail on the head: solar just isn't strong enough. Fantastic conditions for a solar cell is 1 KW/m^2. If you can stick a 1m x 1x array on your car, you get about 1.3 horsepower. Even if you could store it 100% efficiently you've got enough juice to power a lawn mower, not a car.
Even the Smart car that got some press on Wired pumps out 60 hp.
I suppose a backup solar cell on your hydrogen fuel car might be neat if you run out of gas (during the day in a brightly lit place), but you simply cannot carry around enough of them to do without fueling stations.
This is purely a demonstration project. Real science rarely comes from high school projects. Not never, but really, really rarely. And you'll notice that physicists put papers in The Arizona Republic only after they've been rejected by Physical Review Letters.
I'd imagine that "hot cookies" constitute prior art. I can't imagine that any variant on the recipe is going to be considered sufficiently novel unless you wanted to start putting, I dunno, motor oil or anchovies in it. I'm perfectly content to permit you the patent on the smell of chocolate cookies with anchovies.
The most objectionable software patents are so dumb because they seem to fail the "obviousness" test. To be patented, a thing (it used to be a device) had to be useful, novel, and non-obvious. Online shopping carts and one-click shopping strike everybody here as obvious; the ones with the patent aren't the first ones with the idea but merely the first ones with the money to put together a patent.
But not everybody can create a new smell. Well, given the hygiene and dietary standards famous to Slashdotters I'm sure that new smells are created all the time, but I assure you nobody wants those smells. To create a new perfume requires a highly expert skill set. The same applies to food; blending the right chocolate, wine, or coffee is a job for an expert.
I assume that means coming up with a reproduceable smell. I can't imagine you could walk in with something you threw together and say, "I patent this! Nobody else can have it!" without at least being able to describe what it is and how you got it.
I don't know how they're going to judge "distance". In copyrights I imagine that they have some sort of measurement for when a new work is derivative of an old one. I can't pick up a copy of John Grisham's The Jury and change a few letters and copyright it. Similarly I hope nobody would be able to walk in with "This is just like Chanel No. 5 except I added some vanilla extract".
Actually, that would smell kind of nice. But there are getting to be some potentially stupid gray areas, where things are similar, but it's hard to quantify how similar because smells and tastes are a lot harder to examine than inventions and books.
Re:It's not like this is new logic...
on
Fluid Logic Chips
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, they would survive an EM burst.
I used to work in a fluidics laboratory as an intern [hey, I actually know something for once that every Slashdotter doesn't know!] and one of the purposes they were developing this stuff for was because of its ability to survive an EM burst. They were talking about using it in fighter planes for exactly that reason.
This was two decades ago, I'm ashamed to admit [I mean, I can't believe I've gotten so old that I remember two decades ago], and the things this lab built were way, way larger than the stuff being talked about in the article.
82 terajoules is 20 kilotons of TNT, not nearly enough to barbequeue the planet. It's not even enough to make it medium rare. Hiroshima was 12 kilotons of TNT.
Besides, at least according to my calculations, you get about 41,000 terajoules per pound of antimatter, not 82. Most figures give about 4,000 terajoules mer megaton. That's about 10 megatons, a good-sized bomb to toast a city but hardly enough to destroy the planet.
Actually, there's probably a factor of 2 in there since the matter also converts, but I'm not certain about that. It's immaterial here; the difference between 10 megatons and 20 megatons isn't all that large to the planet as a whole. I saw one very unscientific analysis calling for 5*10^16 megatons to blow up the Earth. I'm sure you could wipe all the people out for far less than that, but I'm sure it's more than 10 megatons.
But you're thinking that 82 TJs is enough to nicely irradiate all the people. Lessee: there are 6 billion people, and let's call it 100 kilos each, absorbing 82 TJs is 82*10^12 joules/6*10^11 kilos = 140 joules per kilo. Plenty, since a lethal dose of gamma rays is around 5 joules per kilo.
But that's assuming you could distribute the energy evenly, which you can't. Most of it would zap off into space, and much of the rest would be absorbed by the earth. It all turns into heat before it goes very far. But anybody in the vicinity would get pretty fried.
Actually, a couple of pounds is "only" 18 megatons. Earth is safe, thanks to you, Sky Captain.
I'd think of antimatter not as an energy source but as an energy distribution mechanism. We generate some quantity of it here, then drop it all at once on something we don't like. We couldn't blow up the world with it even if we wanted to, unless we also had enough energy lying around to do it the old-fashioned way. The trick for the military isn't getting your hands on a lot of energy, but applying it exactly where you want it.
So the advantage, like with a nuclear bomb, is the ability to take a fairly small unit to where you want to go. It's just a lot more convenient to drop a few tons of atom bomb on something rather than a million tons of actual TNT.
If you could haul just a gram of the stuff around in your pocket and use that as a 19 kiloton "grenade", that would be very useful militarily. More likely it will take hundreds of points of containment unit (massive magnets and the batteries to run them) so you're going to drop it from an airplane, but it's still a lot easier to fit that into airplane than the 38,000 pounds of coventional explosives you'd have otherwise.
I don't know if we can get any kind of useful efficiency out of it. How many barrels of oil will we have to burn to produce a microgram of antimatter, even in the most efficient case? Is it practical to contain that quantity of antimatter long enough to drop it on a bad guy? Can you make it reasonably safe?
07/088,622 is a patent application rather than a patent. To view patent applications use the advanced search page and enter APN/088622. Only those that became patents are online, however; applications aren't made public. Presumbably, 07/088,622 was never granted a patent, because I can't find it either, but several of the other applications are available as patents.
Generally the history of a patent isn't available. It's not unheard of for people to submit a woefully under-defined patent, submit a bunch of continuations, and then sue somebody. You can't do it any more, but it used to be very profitable. Sadly, I don't know any way to get the whole history. Maybe you could call up a buddy at the USPTO and get into the computer system that way...
To answer your question: no, you don't have to match all the claims. (NOTE: I am NOT a lawyer, and if you believe anything I say they will throw you in jail.) Each claim is considered independently; arguably, each could be written up as a separate patent. It is common, however, for claims to refer to earlier claims. The first claim is often overly-broad and it's the subsequent claims that really specify what's being patented, and it's those claims that are tested in a court.
The RIAA can afford all the bad press it can generate, because you don't go down to the music store and ask, "What's the latest from the RIAA?" 98% of their customers have never heard of them. Bad press is indeed better than no press, but in this case nobody reads this press.
There will be a few people who say, "Gee, I guess I don't want to support the RIAA by buying the Ja Rule album", but I'd bet those numbers are infinitesimal. (Slashdot users often lay claim to this, and to be particular devotees of non-music-industry music, but I'd still say they're in the minority, and if you're truly a fan of indie music you don't have to much worry about the RIAA coming looking for your illegal Nelly downloads anyway.)
I'm afraid I have to consider the "free advertising" line of reasoning to be rationalization. I doubt those who pursue it have quantified the amount of good they're doing. Even if it in fact does more good than harm to the RIAA, if you don't know it for a fact then it's a rationalization rather than a justification. The music doesn't belong to you if you haven't bought it, then you'd better be able to prove something if you want the moral (even if not legal) high ground.
Well, in theory they're not suing their customers. "Customers" are people who pay for stuff. If you're "stealing music" or "infringing copyright", you're not their customer; they get more money out of you by suing you, because it's not like they want your continued goodwill.
Of course practice is more complicated than theory, especially in the case of those who obtain music peer-to-peer as "free samples" and then go out and buy the album. And of course those who are just defending their constitutionally-guaranteed right to fair use (that is, the 71 minues of music you're entitled to download, but not the actual plastic of the disk, because your best friend already bought that, or maybe some guy in Ankara or Boise or somewhere named "kazaaliteuser").
I always prefer to get my info from primary sources rather than some newspaper's rendition, so here are the actual patents involved:
Patent 5,206,951: Integration of data between typed objects by mutual, direct invocation between object managers corresponding to object types
Patent 5,421,012: Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types
Patent 5,226,161: Integration of data between typed data structures by mutual direct invocation between data managers corresponding to data types
Thanks to Artur Biesiadowski, who orignally posted these at Java Lobby.
I haven't had a chance to read them in detail yet; they're slow reading. '012 seems to be the broadest, and it's very, very long. They seem actually to patent object-oriented programming, but they reference the Smalltalk documentation so presumably they're patenting some enhancement. I've been unable to determine what that enhancement is over Smalltalk, so I can't say if Java infringes on it or not.
A note on reading patents: the title is worthless, so please don't write about "I did X in 1967" based solely on the title. The abstract is hardly better, though my quick scan of these indicates that the abstract does actually do a good job of summarizing. The only thing with legal force is the claims, but they're written in a specialized patent language that takes a bit of practice to interpret.
You can usually learn the most from reading the description section, with background and summary, which has less legal force than the claims but is written in something closer to plain English (or at least computer-ese, which you probably speak if you're reading/.)
Totally pure H2O actually tastes surprisingly bad. It doesn't taste like anything at all, and that feels really weird, even if you're just used to tap water (as opposed to mineral water that they're deliberately flavoring).
Most brands do tweak the mineral content a bit to tinker with the flavor, though far less than something labeled "mineral water".
Personally, I drink a lot of tap water, and I'm always faintly embarrassed when I want something to drink on the road and have to run into a 7-11 to buy water. It's slightly more cost-effective to buy a Hyper Gulp filled with water instead of soda, but I kinda like the sports bottle caps, and I like the flavor of Dasani.
It's a ripoff, cosmically speaking, but it's more healthful than buying soda.
But there are many ways to get around that in the latest EO. It won't be released if it will (to quote the EO):
(1) reveal the identity of a confidential human source, or a human intelligence source, or reveal information about the application of an intelligence source or method;
(2) reveal information that would assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction;
(3) reveal information that would impair U.S. cryptologic systems or activities;
(4) reveal information that would impair the application of state of the art technology within a U.S. weapon system;
(5) reveal actual U.S. military war plans that remain in effect;
(6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would seriously and demonstrably impair relations between the United States and a foreign government, or seriously and demonstrably undermine ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;
(7) reveal information that would clearly and demonstrably impair the current ability of United States Government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other protectees for whom protection services, in the interest of the national security, are authorized;
(8) reveal information that would seriously and demonstrably impair current national security emergency preparedness plans or reveal current vulnerabilities of systems, installations, infrastructures, or projects relating to the national security; or
(9) violate a statute, treaty, or international agreement.
That determination is made by the agency head (e.g. CIA, NSA), not by an outside panel, and there's no appeal. So it's automatically declassified unless they care enough to stop it.
I don't believe that they're web-scraping. I believe that they're subscribing to news feeds from those sources. The news sources don't object; I believe that they sign up. Which means that they don't have to scrape; the get the results pre-digested. Most of those sites don't offer open RSS feeds; they offer them only to Google.
It tends to drive people to those news sites, since Google doesn't report the whole story. That's why the news sites participate: it gets eyeballs to their ads (and maybe to subscribe).
But Google doesn't wish to be screen-scraped. They're not delivering RSS; they're delivering a web page with ads. So it's not hypocritical; they're offering a service and asking that you not get in the way of their business model. If you don't like it, don't go.
Gödel was talking about mathematics. Analogizing to the universe is unwarranted.
The standing-on-one-leg version of Gödel: no matter what mathematical system you set up, you have two choices: either it's inconsistent (in which case it's useless) or there are theorems which are true but can't be proven. Or to put it another way: you can't use a mathematical system itself to prove that it is consistent.
Basically, Gödel showed that no matter what mathematical system you come up with, as long as it has a certain amount of power you can construct a sentence along the lines of "this sentence is unproveable", which is true but (alas) unproveable.
But it hasn't been proven that the universe itself is a mathematical system, so I wouldn't use the incompleteness theorems to make any epistemological judgements. The theorems put limits on the utility of mathematics, but don't confuse mathematics for the real world. Math is a model of the world, but the map is not the territory.
If you care, here's a Wiki link which contains useful info.
A football pitch is pretty much the same size as an American football field. The pitch is about the same length and somewhat wider.
An American football field is 100 yards long (plus two ten-yard end zones) and 160 feet (53 1/3 yards) wide.
A soccer field is actually less well defined:
Length: minimum 100 m (110 yds) maximum 110 m (120 yds)
Width: minimum 64 m (70 yds) maximum 75 m (80 yds)
For for the purposes of a rough measurement like the one in the article, football pitch = football field.
Football is a game of inches, with carefully measured increments (the most important being the ten yards between downs). Soccer is more continuous, so precise dimensions are less necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a compromise. It's more difficult to modify the hardware than the software. And the software can easily be compromised without even the owner knowing it by various spyware.
A computer at an internet cafe is likely to have spyware on it, but it would take more work for them to install a physical keylogger. So if you sit down at one of those, you should at least check it for one of these.
So this will protect you when you're borrowing a friend's computer or dropping in on a client or customer. Probably. It can't reduce the trust to zero. You can get closer to zero by borrowing an Ethernet cable and using your own laptop, but it would certainly be convenient to have to bring along nothing more than a tiny USB key than having to schlep around your own processor, monitor, and keyboard.
The front page says "not patented". They could claim it as a trade secret, but not if they plan to introduce an RFC. So even if they don't wish to open their sources, there will be open implementations very quickly.
Assuming there aren't any underlying IP issues. I'm not aware of any patents on the forward error correcting codes they're using, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. And assuming some jackass doesn't say, "Here's a thing and it's not patented; I'll patent it and then license it back to the guys who did the work!" The patent office seems to do a lousy job of checking non-patent prior art.
From the first paragraph of TFA:
This problem stems from the fact that TCP calculates the congestion of the channel based on its round-trip time. The round-trip time, however, reflects not only the congestion level, but also the physical length of the connection. This is precisely why TCP is inherently unable to reach optimal speeds on long high-bandwidth connections.
A secondary, but just as impairing, property of TCP is its inability to tolerate even small amounts (1% - 3%) of packet loss.
I find it kind of interesting that these are two competing problems: one having to do with high bandwidth (and presumably high-reliability) connections, the other with low-reliability connections. My home DSL, however, often fits into the latter category: 3% packet loss is not uncommon on bad days. So maybe the two aren't so incompatible after all.
While I lament the death of Usenet as a tool, many of its purposes have been subsumed by the Web. Slashdot itself is a key example. For various software products company web boards have replaced the Usenet group.
That's not just due to the the flamers there are also technological reasons. Usenet is a store-and-forward system; it's replicated all over the place (usually at your ISP). That was crucial when even the high-speed lines between service providers were 56kbps, but today you can go to a single site from anywhere and get decent response time. The distributed system made it slow and unreliable.
Web sites also have the advantage over Usenet in that you can use a single tool that you already have to access it. You don't need to install special software. It's true that most Windows users already have Outlook, but wouldn't know how to configure it.
I do lament the death of Usenet. There are many things it does better than the web sites do. Back in the day I could go to comp.lang.apl and confer with reliable experts on APL. And actually that's still true for some newsgroups, the obscurer the better. But at this point the death of Usenet is recursive: I don't go there because nobody else goes there. I'll sometimes use Google Groups to search it for answers to a question, but since I'm not posting to it nobody else gets to converse with me, and so they too gradually drop out.
And it's too bad that I have to learn hundreds of different web-based message systems (with the corresponding array of logins to maintain) rather than the single point of entry to Usenet.
Slashdot, and most other bulletin-board type systems, doesn't do the sort of long-term conversations that Usenet was good for. But people now go to other places for entertainment; conversation is out. It's much more passive and that's too bad. So it makes me sad that I don't even have a newsreader any more.
Those who modded it up were presumably hoping it would get noticed and answered. It's a rather insightful question; I don't really understand why "c is constant in all reference frames" either, even though I've read all this stuff enough times to understand why the various transformation formulas derive from that assumption.
I think Slashdotters aren't so much opposed to advertising as to the most impolite uses of it.
The best thing about ads on Slashdot is that they're extremely well targeted. There's a very good reason to believe you're going to want the product they're advertising. Slashdot ads are in good taste; they don't advertise penis enlargers or porn. Google ads are also well targeted.
The other concern is distraction. When Slashdot puts up an ad at worst it's a moving GIF (which I have turned off anyway); it's never the extremely distracting flashing-red-on-yellow. Such ads make the page very hard to read, and you don't want to come back.
Some people find even that bit of advertising too distracting, and I like Slashdot's way of saying, "Look, we have to pay for this somehow. Send us money and you don't have to see the ads." It seems a good compromise.
The worst infringer is spam, which is taking advantage of your openness with your email address. That openness is a good thing; you could whitelist people but that would be extremely inconvenient and you'd miss real opportunities. They are also frauds more often than not.
Newspaper ads are not impolite. They don't move. They're usually at least a little bit relevant and almost never outright fraud (even if "advertorials" can be extremely opinionated.) I think the worst I've noticed are "collectible coins" whose value is far less than stated in the ads. It's a far cry from Nigerian scams and fake herbal ecstasy.
So I'd say that slashdotters as a group (there are always individual exceptions) aren't opposed to ads themselves so much as they are opposed to impoliteness. This Firefox ad sounds like a polite way to make an announcment and reach a lot of people without actively irritating those who do not wish to know.
Depends on what you want to do with it. You can't push a trillion polygons through 'em, and you can't render video on 'em, but for office suites, email, and web browing, a $500 Dell is entirely sufficient. ($300 if you take into account the fact that you already own a monitor by now and don't need a new one.)
The entry point to Windows is lower than the entry point to Macintosh. I believe you can score an eMac for around $800.
Whether you'll enjoy it as much as an eMac, which is a few hundred dollars more, that's a matter of taste. The article is about top-of-the-line systems, but a lot of the nice things it has to say apply just as well to the bottom end of the Mac line.
Absolutely. Every time we climb one branch higher on this tree, we're one step closer to the moon. We're on our way!
I read Google News for the same reason I metamoderate slashdot. It gives me a random glimpse of some things I wouldn't read otherwise.
It's not the best view, but it's an interestingly quirky one. But I also read other sources for a more consistent view, the same way I read the Slashdot homepage.
I'm just worried that the way they will regulate it will make it impossible. I can easily see them mandating equipment to prevent boosters from falling on people's houses even though they're shooting from the Mojave desert and there's no chance of it happening.
Or mandating a bunch of extra safety equipment on board that makes the thing too heavy to fly. This is a risky endeavor, and it's going to operate on the edge of safety. Those who go up crave that risk and that adventure. They want to know that reasonable precautions for their safety have been taken, but there is a line where too much safety makes the whole venture impossible; weight is everything on this.
I agree that it is the place of government to protect us from each other, and I hope that well-written legislation can make it happen. Sadly, I've seen very little well-written legislation.
If they say, "You must clear out a space X miles wide for every Y miles you want to go up", I think that sounds reasonable. But if they want you to put airbags on the thing, especially if that comes about because the Senator from the Airbag Producing State decides his constituents want to sell more airbags, they could kill the entire venture all at once.
[I can't believe I'm suddenly sounding like a Republican. I'm usually all for government regulation; it's our communal way to keep us safe from each other, and I never trust the oil or chemical industries to regulate themselves. But in this case it's a bunch of smart people who don't want to kill anybody or look bad, so I do trust them to regulate themselves better than Congress can.]
You've hit the nail on the head: solar just isn't strong enough. Fantastic conditions for a solar cell is 1 KW/m^2. If you can stick a 1m x 1x array on your car, you get about 1.3 horsepower. Even if you could store it 100% efficiently you've got enough juice to power a lawn mower, not a car.
Even the Smart car that got some press on Wired pumps out 60 hp.
I suppose a backup solar cell on your hydrogen fuel car might be neat if you run out of gas (during the day in a brightly lit place), but you simply cannot carry around enough of them to do without fueling stations.
This is purely a demonstration project. Real science rarely comes from high school projects. Not never, but really, really rarely. And you'll notice that physicists put papers in The Arizona Republic only after they've been rejected by Physical Review Letters.
I'd imagine that "hot cookies" constitute prior art. I can't imagine that any variant on the recipe is going to be considered sufficiently novel unless you wanted to start putting, I dunno, motor oil or anchovies in it. I'm perfectly content to permit you the patent on the smell of chocolate cookies with anchovies.
I think I'll go make some prior art right now.
The most objectionable software patents are so dumb because they seem to fail the "obviousness" test. To be patented, a thing (it used to be a device) had to be useful, novel, and non-obvious. Online shopping carts and one-click shopping strike everybody here as obvious; the ones with the patent aren't the first ones with the idea but merely the first ones with the money to put together a patent.
But not everybody can create a new smell. Well, given the hygiene and dietary standards famous to Slashdotters I'm sure that new smells are created all the time, but I assure you nobody wants those smells. To create a new perfume requires a highly expert skill set. The same applies to food; blending the right chocolate, wine, or coffee is a job for an expert.
I assume that means coming up with a reproduceable smell. I can't imagine you could walk in with something you threw together and say, "I patent this! Nobody else can have it!" without at least being able to describe what it is and how you got it.
I don't know how they're going to judge "distance". In copyrights I imagine that they have some sort of measurement for when a new work is derivative of an old one. I can't pick up a copy of John Grisham's The Jury and change a few letters and copyright it. Similarly I hope nobody would be able to walk in with "This is just like Chanel No. 5 except I added some vanilla extract".
Actually, that would smell kind of nice. But there are getting to be some potentially stupid gray areas, where things are similar, but it's hard to quantify how similar because smells and tastes are a lot harder to examine than inventions and books.
Yes, they would survive an EM burst.
I used to work in a fluidics laboratory as an intern [hey, I actually know something for once that every Slashdotter doesn't know!] and one of the purposes they were developing this stuff for was because of its ability to survive an EM burst. They were talking about using it in fighter planes for exactly that reason.
This was two decades ago, I'm ashamed to admit [I mean, I can't believe I've gotten so old that I remember two decades ago], and the things this lab built were way, way larger than the stuff being talked about in the article.
82 terajoules is 20 kilotons of TNT, not nearly enough to barbequeue the planet. It's not even enough to make it medium rare. Hiroshima was 12 kilotons of TNT.
Besides, at least according to my calculations, you get about 41,000 terajoules per pound of antimatter, not 82. Most figures give about 4,000 terajoules mer megaton. That's about 10 megatons, a good-sized bomb to toast a city but hardly enough to destroy the planet.
Actually, there's probably a factor of 2 in there since the matter also converts, but I'm not certain about that. It's immaterial here; the difference between 10 megatons and 20 megatons isn't all that large to the planet as a whole. I saw one very unscientific analysis calling for 5*10^16 megatons to blow up the Earth. I'm sure you could wipe all the people out for far less than that, but I'm sure it's more than 10 megatons.
But you're thinking that 82 TJs is enough to nicely irradiate all the people. Lessee: there are 6 billion people, and let's call it 100 kilos each, absorbing 82 TJs is 82*10^12 joules/6*10^11 kilos = 140 joules per kilo. Plenty, since a lethal dose of gamma rays is around 5 joules per kilo.
But that's assuming you could distribute the energy evenly, which you can't. Most of it would zap off into space, and much of the rest would be absorbed by the earth. It all turns into heat before it goes very far. But anybody in the vicinity would get pretty fried.
Actually, a couple of pounds is "only" 18 megatons. Earth is safe, thanks to you, Sky Captain.
I'd think of antimatter not as an energy source but as an energy distribution mechanism. We generate some quantity of it here, then drop it all at once on something we don't like. We couldn't blow up the world with it even if we wanted to, unless we also had enough energy lying around to do it the old-fashioned way. The trick for the military isn't getting your hands on a lot of energy, but applying it exactly where you want it.
So the advantage, like with a nuclear bomb, is the ability to take a fairly small unit to where you want to go. It's just a lot more convenient to drop a few tons of atom bomb on something rather than a million tons of actual TNT.
If you could haul just a gram of the stuff around in your pocket and use that as a 19 kiloton "grenade", that would be very useful militarily. More likely it will take hundreds of points of containment unit (massive magnets and the batteries to run them) so you're going to drop it from an airplane, but it's still a lot easier to fit that into airplane than the 38,000 pounds of coventional explosives you'd have otherwise.
I don't know if we can get any kind of useful efficiency out of it. How many barrels of oil will we have to burn to produce a microgram of antimatter, even in the most efficient case? Is it practical to contain that quantity of antimatter long enough to drop it on a bad guy? Can you make it reasonably safe?
07/088,622 is a patent application rather than a patent. To view patent applications use the advanced search page and enter APN/088622. Only those that became patents are online, however; applications aren't made public. Presumbably, 07/088,622 was never granted a patent, because I can't find it either, but several of the other applications are available as patents.
Generally the history of a patent isn't available. It's not unheard of for people to submit a woefully under-defined patent, submit a bunch of continuations, and then sue somebody. You can't do it any more, but it used to be very profitable. Sadly, I don't know any way to get the whole history. Maybe you could call up a buddy at the USPTO and get into the computer system that way...
To answer your question: no, you don't have to match all the claims. (NOTE: I am NOT a lawyer, and if you believe anything I say they will throw you in jail.) Each claim is considered independently; arguably, each could be written up as a separate patent. It is common, however, for claims to refer to earlier claims. The first claim is often overly-broad and it's the subsequent claims that really specify what's being patented, and it's those claims that are tested in a court.
The RIAA can afford all the bad press it can generate, because you don't go down to the music store and ask, "What's the latest from the RIAA?" 98% of their customers have never heard of them. Bad press is indeed better than no press, but in this case nobody reads this press.
There will be a few people who say, "Gee, I guess I don't want to support the RIAA by buying the Ja Rule album", but I'd bet those numbers are infinitesimal. (Slashdot users often lay claim to this, and to be particular devotees of non-music-industry music, but I'd still say they're in the minority, and if you're truly a fan of indie music you don't have to much worry about the RIAA coming looking for your illegal Nelly downloads anyway.)
I'm afraid I have to consider the "free advertising" line of reasoning to be rationalization. I doubt those who pursue it have quantified the amount of good they're doing. Even if it in fact does more good than harm to the RIAA, if you don't know it for a fact then it's a rationalization rather than a justification. The music doesn't belong to you if you haven't bought it, then you'd better be able to prove something if you want the moral (even if not legal) high ground.
Well, in theory they're not suing their customers. "Customers" are people who pay for stuff. If you're "stealing music" or "infringing copyright", you're not their customer; they get more money out of you by suing you, because it's not like they want your continued goodwill.
Of course practice is more complicated than theory, especially in the case of those who obtain music peer-to-peer as "free samples" and then go out and buy the album. And of course those who are just defending their constitutionally-guaranteed right to fair use (that is, the 71 minues of music you're entitled to download, but not the actual plastic of the disk, because your best friend already bought that, or maybe some guy in Ankara or Boise or somewhere named "kazaaliteuser").
I always prefer to get my info from primary sources rather than some newspaper's rendition, so here are the actual patents involved:
/.)
Patent 5,206,951: Integration of data between typed objects by mutual, direct invocation between object managers corresponding to object types
Patent 5,421,012: Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types
Patent 5,226,161: Integration of data between typed data structures by mutual direct invocation between data managers corresponding to data types
Thanks to Artur Biesiadowski, who orignally posted these at Java Lobby.
I haven't had a chance to read them in detail yet; they're slow reading. '012 seems to be the broadest, and it's very, very long. They seem actually to patent object-oriented programming, but they reference the Smalltalk documentation so presumably they're patenting some enhancement. I've been unable to determine what that enhancement is over Smalltalk, so I can't say if Java infringes on it or not.
A note on reading patents: the title is worthless, so please don't write about "I did X in 1967" based solely on the title. The abstract is hardly better, though my quick scan of these indicates that the abstract does actually do a good job of summarizing. The only thing with legal force is the claims, but they're written in a specialized patent language that takes a bit of practice to interpret.
You can usually learn the most from reading the description section, with background and summary, which has less legal force than the claims but is written in something closer to plain English (or at least computer-ese, which you probably speak if you're reading
Totally pure H2O actually tastes surprisingly bad. It doesn't taste like anything at all, and that feels really weird, even if you're just used to tap water (as opposed to mineral water that they're deliberately flavoring).
Most brands do tweak the mineral content a bit to tinker with the flavor, though far less than something labeled "mineral water".
Personally, I drink a lot of tap water, and I'm always faintly embarrassed when I want something to drink on the road and have to run into a 7-11 to buy water. It's slightly more cost-effective to buy a Hyper Gulp filled with water instead of soda, but I kinda like the sports bottle caps, and I like the flavor of Dasani.
It's a ripoff, cosmically speaking, but it's more healthful than buying soda.
Clinton's Executive Order 12958 reduced that to 25 years in most cases. (The more recent version is Bush's Executive Order 13292).
But there are many ways to get around that in the latest EO. It won't be released if it will (to quote the EO):
(1) reveal the identity of a confidential human source, or a human intelligence source, or reveal information about the application of an intelligence source or method;
(2) reveal information that would assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction;
(3) reveal information that would impair U.S. cryptologic systems or activities;
(4) reveal information that would impair the application of state of the art technology within a U.S. weapon system;
(5) reveal actual U.S. military war plans that remain in effect;
(6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would seriously and demonstrably impair relations between the United States and a foreign government, or seriously and demonstrably undermine ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;
(7) reveal information that would clearly and demonstrably impair the current ability of United States Government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other protectees for whom protection services, in the interest of the national security, are authorized;
(8) reveal information that would seriously and demonstrably impair current national security emergency preparedness plans or reveal current vulnerabilities of systems, installations, infrastructures, or projects relating to the national security; or
(9) violate a statute, treaty, or international agreement.
That determination is made by the agency head (e.g. CIA, NSA), not by an outside panel, and there's no appeal. So it's automatically declassified unless they care enough to stop it.
I don't believe that they're web-scraping. I believe that they're subscribing to news feeds from those sources. The news sources don't object; I believe that they sign up. Which means that they don't have to scrape; the get the results pre-digested. Most of those sites don't offer open RSS feeds; they offer them only to Google.
It tends to drive people to those news sites, since Google doesn't report the whole story. That's why the news sites participate: it gets eyeballs to their ads (and maybe to subscribe).
But Google doesn't wish to be screen-scraped. They're not delivering RSS; they're delivering a web page with ads. So it's not hypocritical; they're offering a service and asking that you not get in the way of their business model. If you don't like it, don't go.
Gödel was talking about mathematics. Analogizing to the universe is unwarranted.
The standing-on-one-leg version of Gödel: no matter what mathematical system you set up, you have two choices: either it's inconsistent (in which case it's useless) or there are theorems which are true but can't be proven. Or to put it another way: you can't use a mathematical system itself to prove that it is consistent.
Basically, Gödel showed that no matter what mathematical system you come up with, as long as it has a certain amount of power you can construct a sentence along the lines of "this sentence is unproveable", which is true but (alas) unproveable.
But it hasn't been proven that the universe itself is a mathematical system, so I wouldn't use the incompleteness theorems to make any epistemological judgements. The theorems put limits on the utility of mathematics, but don't confuse mathematics for the real world. Math is a model of the world, but the map is not the territory.
If you care, here's a Wiki link which contains useful info.
A football pitch is pretty much the same size as an American football field. The pitch is about the same length and somewhat wider.
An American football field is 100 yards long (plus two ten-yard end zones) and 160 feet (53 1/3 yards) wide.
A soccer field is actually less well defined:
Length: minimum 100 m (110 yds) maximum 110 m (120 yds)
Width: minimum 64 m (70 yds) maximum 75 m (80 yds)
For for the purposes of a rough measurement like the one in the article, football pitch = football field.
Football is a game of inches, with carefully measured increments (the most important being the ten yards between downs). Soccer is more continuous, so precise dimensions are less necessary.